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Saw The Avengers: Age of Ultron Sunday. Mrs M’s traditional Mother’s Day treat of a superhero movie. Working on my review but in the meantime, thought I’d repost my review of the first Avengers movie. The Captain America and Thor sequels and the second Avengers hadn’t been given their subtitles yet when I wrote the review.

This is what you get when you let a former English professor write movie reviews.

Within the cycle of movies of which The Avengers is the latest installment, Tony Stark---Iron Man---fills the role Lancelot fills in the King Arthur stories.

I warned you.

The Avengers isn’t a retelling of the Knights of the Round Table. For one thing, there’s no King Arthur. (If anyone wants to make the case that Nick Fury plays that role, feel free. I think it’s a reach. Try Merlin instead.) And I'm not making a direct comparison of their personalities. In personality, Stark is no Lancelot. If he has a counterpart among any of the Knights of the Roundtable, it's Gawain. Gawain is vain, boastful, selfish, self-indulgent, a showoff and happy to think he can do it all on his own. He's also the second best of Arthur's knights. He was the best until Lancelot showed up. Fans can argue the actual ranking of the Avengers vis-a-vis each other. What matters is that Gawain wasn't inclined to admit to his demotion and Stark would disagree with you if you didn't rank Iron Man first. A lot of his best lines in the movie are cheap shots at the other heroes' expenses meant to let them know he's not impressed by them or their powers.

(The only other Avenger who even roughly has an Arthurian double is Captain America. He's like Galahad whose strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure. The super-soldier serum worked as it did on Steve Rogers because he had a good heart.)

Still, the comparison to Lancelot holds in that like Lancelot Iron Man is the hero around whose story the other heroes' stories are centered.

“I am Iron Man,” Stark declares at the end of his first movie. But as we learn in Iron Man 2, he’s not. Iron Man is just a robot Stark pilots from within. And for the robot to do its job it almost doesn’t matter who’s wearing the metal suit. What matters is if Stark can make the suit into a skin, that is, into an extension of himself. And a lot has to change for that to happen. Every one of Lancelot’s adventures is crucial to the overall story of the Knights of the Round Table because the fate of Camelot depends on Lancelot remaining the exemplary knight he is while constantly confronted with the temptation to be just a man. Every one of Iron Man’s adventures is crucial to the ongoing story of the Avengers because the fates of the Avengers and the world depend on Stark becoming a knight in shining armor, and he’s having a hard time with that.

Ok. Before taking this analogy any further…

I liked it. It’s fun. I had a good time. The Avengers is a good superhero movie.

It’s not a good movie the way Spider-Man 2 and Batman Begins are good movies. Rio Bravo is a good movie. Rio Lobo is a good Western. The Dirty Dozen is a good war movie. The Guns of Navarone is a good movie. The Avengers is a good superhero movie. The best in this particular series of superhero movies after the first Iron Man.

Part of what makes it good is that it is very much a piece of that series. Director Joss Whedon, who also wrote the screenplay, has clearly studied and liked and taken to heart the previous movies in the series and he deftly weaves together narrative and thematic threads from Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger into one taut strand, pulls that strand smoothly through the movie, then quickly unravels it and spools the threads out towards the next movies in the series. The Avengers sets up Captain America 2,Thor 2, and Iron Man 3. (It doesn’t directly set up The Avengers 2. That’s coming but it will have to pick up the threads from those sequels and do its part in continuing the series.) As Whedon has apparently learned from his long career in television and as a writer of comic books, everything doesn’t depend on single episode or issue. The job of any particular episode or issue, in fact, is to get the audience excited about what’s coming next so they’ll tune in next week or buy next month’s issue. For all the spectacle and mayhem that goes with bringing together Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and setting them up to fight off an invading alien army in the streets of New York City while landmarks like Grand Central Station are destroyed around them, The Avengers is a movie with an admirably modest ambition.

Moving the story along.

There’s a kick in watching the Avengers assemble for the first time and in listening to our favorites banter and argue. The dialog is sharp and snappy. The jokes are funny. The suspense level is high. Whedon makes us worry about every character. But the main reason for seeing The Avengers is the same reason why when you’re reading a book and you finish Chapter 10 you move on to Chapter 11 instead of skipping ahead to Chapter 12. It’s a fun and exciting chapter and, if you’re all caught up with your reading, a gratifying one that will have you nodding in appreciation and saying to yourself, “So that’s where they were going with that!” and “Of course! I should have seen that coming!” and even “Wow, I wasn’t expecting that at all!” But that’s the thing. All those reactions depend on your having done the homework.

You don’t need to be a fan of the comic books to enjoy The Avengers, but I don’t see how anyone who hasn’t seen the other movies in the series will be able to follow this one or find a reason to care about many of the characters or the story. Whedon is used to playing to an audience that includes lots of people who missed last week’s episode, so maybe I missed all the ways he slipped in to help viewers just tuning in catch up. But it seems to me that if you haven’t seen Iron Man 2, you won’t know why Tony Stark is a problem for the other heroes and himself. If you haven’t seen Iron Man, Iron Man 2, and Thor you won’t know why Agent Coulson matters or appreciate Clark Gregg’s performance in the part. If you haven’t seen Thor, you may think Tom Hiddleston is a ham of an actor instead of a great one. If you haven’t seen Captain America: The First Avenger you won’t know why Cap is so forlorn or appreciate the subtext in his and Stark’s instant dislike of each other. And if you haven’t seen The Incredible Hulk, you might not get Bruce Banner’s best joke.

Note: I’m not warning anybody away from The Avengers. I’m just saying if you’re thinking of going and really want to get the most of it, watch at least a couple of the other movies. They’re good and good for you.

I’m also saying that The Avengers isn’t a good movie in and of itself because it depends so much on those other movies. Which is not a bad thing, just something to keep in mind when you’re telling friends how AWESOME it is.

And it is AWESOME. With the above caveats.

Of course the star attractions are the stars, both the real life ones and the ones from the comic books they play. Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and Mark Ruffalo, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and the Hulk.

Evans does what he had to do going in, hold his own against Downey and Hemsworth while playing a much duller character and then make that dullness as compelling as Stark's naughty boy charm and Thor's swashbuckling sex appeal. Evans doesn't have Cap fight for his authority - if anything he has him doubting it. Cap's sense of himself is tied to what he sees as his place in the world, but his world is seventy years in the past. When the time is right, he assumes it, without fuss but with confidence. Events conspire to re-create a need and therefore a place for Captain America and Cap steps right in and suddenly Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and the entire New York City police force are gladly taking orders from him. Evans is a modest enough and secure enough actor to let the movie come to him.

If you haven't seen Thor, you might not feel as I did that Chris Hemsworth is underused. Whatever those of you who did see it might have thought of Thor the movie, I think you have to admit Hemsworth was terrific as Thor the god of thunder. He established himself as a star and swashbuckling leading man in the tradition of not just Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn but Gene Kelly---how else would you describe Kelly's dancing style besides swashbuckling? What is his D'Artagnan doing while dueling if not dancing?---and Harrison Ford. In fact, if Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are truly intent on continuing with another Indiana Jones movie, they should consider doing a total reboot starring Hemsworth.

Thor's main job as part of the Avengers---and I mean the team as portrayed in the movie, not the whole movie itself---is to bring the mighty when the mighty's most needed. But the movie takes his mightiness as a given and his role in the story is to provide kindly approval of Cap, of Stark, and of human beings in general and show sympathetic disapproval of Loki. Tom Hiddleston's Loki isn't dismissible as another cackling movie super villain because Hemsworth's Thor doesn't see him that way.

I would have liked to have seen a little more of this side of Thor in scenes with Evans and Downey. I'm also disappointed that Whedon didn't put him together with either Cobie Smulders or Scarlett Johansson. It would have been fun watching him charm them nearly out of their catsuits. And a scene between Hemsworth, Downey, and Paltrow in which Pepper Potts swoons for Thor while Stark drives himself nuts trying not to show how jealous he is would have been a real hoot.

Can't have everything, and one thing The Avengers has that I didn't expect was Mark Ruffalo's brilliantly understated take on Bruce Banner and the Hulk.

The Incredible Hulk is the weakest in the series, but it’s still a pretty good superhero movie. I thought its major flaw was the coldness and detachment of Edward Norton’s Bruce Banner. Norton overemphasized Banner’s efforts to remain calm in order to keep himself from Hulking out. Ruffalo’s Banner isn’t calm. He’s ferociously, strenuously, and exhaustingly repressed. He’s in the habit of referring to the Hulk as “the other guy,” but Ruffalo says the words with an ironic sneer in his voice and a look of fear in his eyes that let us know Banner is terrified and, even more wrenching, growing resigned to the fact that it’s Banner who’s the other guy and that the Hulk is the real him and the moment is closing in when the Hulk will assert himself for good.

When he reveals his “secret” to Cap in one of the movie’s most rousing lines, it’s one of those satisfying “I knew it!” moments.

The breakout character, however, is Black Widow. Can't say Scarlett Johansson brings anything special to the role besides an impressive deadpanning of her dominatrix persona and the ability to wear her catsuit with insouciance. But Natasha Romanoff---as far as I recall, she's only referred to as Black Widow once and then by an enemy spymaster who's using the code name that's the only name he has for her---turns out to have a superpower.

She thinks faster than a speeding bullet.

Literally.

I say Johansson doesn’t bring anything special to the part, but that’s not to say she brings nothing. Intense and concentrated intelligence blazes out of her eyes as hot and almost as visibly as Superman’s heat vision. She makes us realize that all Black Widow’s backflips, spin and scissor kicks, headbutts, karate chops, throat punches, and two-gun pistol shooting on the slide aren’t reflexive. They’re plotted. If The Avengers was a Guy Ritchie movie we’d see her in slow-motion set-ups, carefully assessing each opponent and planning her particular lines of attack. The bad guys aren’t being out-fought as much as out-thought. And this holds true when she’s not in a physical fight.

In mental duels, she out-thinks two of the smartest characters in the movie.

Still, I felt a little as though she was being forced into a leading role and forced at me. Black Widow is a sidekick---my son thinks “sidekick” is a disparagement of her awesomeness. I should say she’s a first lieutenant to the hero-kings---and there is no other female character of note. I'm not counting Gwyneth Paltrow's extended cameo. As SHIELD agent Maria Hill, Smulders seems to be only on hand to wear the catsuit in case Johansson decides not to sign up for The Avengers 2.

At first glance it might seem that as Nick Fury Samuel L. Jackson hasn't been given much more to do but glower and growl and wear his black leather trench coat with a coolness that will make you desperate to own one yourself even though you know in your heart you will never be anywhere near that cool. But as Stark warns, Fury is the spy's spy. He serves his country by lying and manipulation. Jackson makes us see the sinister side of Fury's nature. He's not just Mace Windu with an eye patch. He has more than a touch of Darth Sidious and Darth Vader to make you want to rethink that black trench coat. You never worry about which side of the Force he's on. You just wonder if there's anyone he doesn't think of as a tool or a weapon to be used.

Like I said, you don't have to be a fan of the comic books to enjoy the movie, but if you're not I can't see how you won't be thoroughly baffled by the apparently wasted presence of Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye (or even know he's called Hawkeye) for about two thirds the way through. Then he starts bringing the archery awesome and you'll be too busy thinking to yourself “I need to get a bow and arrow!” to care about his backstory.

But, getting down to it, I still see The Avengers as Robert Downey’s movie and the story being moved along as Iron Man’s story.

Of the big three, Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor, Iron Man is the unfinished character. Captain America just needed to get his chance and in his movie he got it. Thor has learned his most important lesson. But when last we left Tony Stark at the end of Iron Man 2, he was still not a hero. Iron Man and Tony Stark were separate entities and Nick Fury had decided he could do without the former if the former could only be had with the latter.

He’s still an open question and I’m not giving anything away by telling you that The Avengers leaves that question open.

Downey and Ruffalo have a couple of wonderful and funny scenes together in which Stark and Banner play dueling geniuses on their virtual drawing boards. Hemsworth’s not the only one of the stars who can dance, so to speak. In the exuberant physicality of what is essentially a comic song and dance act, Downey and Ruffalo reminded me of Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor or, maybe more aptly, Hugh Jackman and Neal Patrick Harris at last year’s Tony Awards. What we’re watching is a partnership and a rivalry.

Stark has been drawn to Banner in an openly admiring and affectionate way we’ve never seen him drawn to any other character including Pepper Potts---mostly we’ve seen him deliberately annoying people in order to push them away. In Banner he finds a potential soulmate capable of playing with him on his level, someone who shares his passion for science and can keep up.

But as they work together to solve a problem, Stark can’t resist turning it into a competition.

At first it seems as though he’s only trying to distract Banner by teasing him and peppering him with one-liners. But then what he’s doing becomes more sinister and dangerous. He’s trying to provoke him. If Banner has to concentrate on keeping his cool, he won’t be able to focus on the problem. But it gets worse.

He’s curious.

He wants to see Banner Hulk out.

It’s the pure scientist in him getting the better of him. He can’t help seeing another human being as a potential science experiment.

Which is insane. Never mind for the moment that the fate of the earth is at stake. Trapping himself in a small room with the Hulk when he’s not wearing his armor is a really, really, really bad idea.

And this is why I say that the whole series (so far) has been basically The Romance of Tony Stark and that’s likely going to be a main theme as the series moves forward.

Whatever the ostensible plots and whoever the villains, Thor 2 is going to be about Thor being awesome while searching for his lost love and Captain America 2 will be about Steve Rogers trying to find a place for himself in the 21st century besides being Captain America. But Iron Man 3 will be about whether or not Stark’s going to screw up again and how and how bad and how much of the result of that will carry over into The Avengers 2.

To get back to the Knights of the Round Table analogy, the one way Stark is most like Lancelot is that in both their romances everything depends on how the hero responds to his chief temptation which for Lancelot and Tony Stark is the temptation to put self before duty. For Lancelot that temptation comes in the form of his love for Guinevere. For Stark it's straightforwardly his ego.

Every tale of Lancelot foreshadows Lancelot’s ultimate failure and the breaking of the Round Table and the destruction of Camelot. Every one of Iron Man’s adventures (so far) foreshadows Stark’s potential failure to be the hero he and the world need him to be.

Again, I don’t think I’m giving anything away by telling you that in The Avengers we learn that if he has to Stark can overcome the temptation and be Iron Man and not just Iron Man's pilot, a billionaire, genius, playboy, philanthropist in a metal suit. It doesn't tell us that he is past temptation.

It’s a hilarious moment and a key one when Stark recognizes similarities between himself and Loki. But we’re left to wonder what he’s going to do with this newfound self-awareness.

The romance is unfinished. The comedy or the tragedy is still to be played out. The story continues.

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Important note to moviegoers: Watch through the credits. All the credits.

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Readers beware: I’ve been trying not to give too much away in the posts, but I’m not enforcing a no spoiler zone in the comments. The discussion down there is wide-open so don’t venture in unless you’ve seen the movie or don’t mind. On the other hand, if you’re commenting, try to keep in mind that some people might wander in on the conversation by mistake. Be as indirect and circumspect as you can. And for gods’ sake, whatever you do, don’t give away the final scene!

Because the internet is forever, I spent some time yesterday revising and copyediting a six year old post, my review of Pirate Radio from spring of 2009. Actually, it didn’t need that much work. Just a bit of polishing. Reads pretty well, I think, and it wasn’t a bad little movie.

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Because it's set in Great Britain in 1966, Pirate Radio,also known as The Boat That Rocked, inadvertently raises and unsatisfactorily answers the question What was rock and roll rebelling against if it wasn’t the Vietnam War?

Rock and roll pre-dates the anti-war movement by well over a decade---even longer, if you want to make the case that rock really began with what the blues musicians were doing in the late 40s---and for most of those years the answer to the question, What are you rebelling against? had been provided by Marlon Brando in The Wild One, What have you got?

Really, though, rock and roll wasn’t the music of rebellion or political protest---that was folk music’s job. It was the singing of the collective hearts of millions teenagers. It was the music of youthful high spirits and burgeoning sexuality and that’s why the grown-ups hated it. So in a roundabout way rock became a counter-protest against parents and other authority figures protesting against rock.

That side of things had become old hat by 1966 (See 1963's Bye, Bye Birdie, a mainstream Broadway musical that’s mainly about how square the old folks are when it comes to music and sex, and Ed Sullivan, who did not book the Beatles, the Stones, and the rest because he wanted to stick it to the Man) and it’s possible that if the War hadn’t come along rock and roll would have gone tamer sooner and what happened to it in the post-punk, MTVed 80s would have happened to it in the late 60s or early 70s. Complete commercialization.

Actually, it more or less did happen in the early 70s. Punk and New Wave wererebellions---against what had happened to the music.

But the US went full-tilt into Vietnam and over here rock and roll became tied to the anti-war movement and so the music became explicitly political or was interpreted as political even if the lyrics seemed to be about other things, except, you know, when it was explicitly or was interpreted to be about getting stoned or getting laid, but then getting stoned and getting laid had political implications in those days too, so it was all about the War.

Here.

Over in Britain, that didn’t happen. Not that British kids didn’t protest the war. They just didn’t have the same sense of…urgency. So, I’ll ask again. What was rock and roll rebelling against over there?

Pirate Radio’s unsatisfying answer is Kenneth Branagh.

I enjoyed Pirate Radio but I’m going to be hard pressed to find a lot of good to say about it as a movie. As a documentation of how fine actors can take the slightest material and without putting a lot of effort into it or showing off can make you wish you could see their Hamlet or Lear---or in the case of Nick Frost, his Falstaff---it’s fun. Kind of like being in the room when your favorite musicians strike up an impromptu rock and roll version of "You Are My Sunshine."

But as a story it’s, well, not one. It’s a series of character sketches not so much strung as chained, heavily and ponderously, together by a theme the material just doesn’t bear.

The crew of DJs aboard the boat that rocks, a refitted freighter from which, in defiance of a law I find it hard to believe existed (Editor’s note: But see the comments below) and out of reach of the police, they broadcast music by the Kinks, the Stones, the Hollies, the Who, and just about every other band and and singer renowned over here as stars of the British Invasion, except for the Beatles, for whose songs I assume the movie’s producers couldn’t get the rights. The DJs regard themselves as fighters in a guerrilla war against forces of repression, conformity, enforced bourgeois dullness, and the eradication of any colors from clothing except gray.

But the only representative of these forces is the character played by Branagh.

Branagh plays the gray-haired, gray-faced, gray-suited, gray-souled Sir Alistair Dormandy, a cabinet minister who has decided it’s his job to shut down the radio pirates because…because…

Well, because. You get the feeling he’d have made it his mission to put the pirates out of business no matter what they were broadcasting, Mozart, jazz, songs me old dad sung to me around the campfire, or all-polka all the time. Dormandy seems to hate the pirates on principle, but he never explains what that principle is. It doesn’t appear to be moral, philosophical, religious, legal, or musical. What it really seems to be is pathological. Based on a scene in which he is shown rigidly enduring his own family’s Christmas celebration, you’d have to guess that what really motivates him is an aversion to fun.

And it’s not the Puritan’s aversion to fun. A Puritan hates fun because it might cause people to forget to mind their morals and their duties to God and business. Dormandy seems to hate fun because it might lead to messiness. He describes a young colleague’s slightly longish and unbrushed hair as “ugly.” To him, it’s not that order creates beauty. Orderliness, for it’s own sake, is beauty, although he would not use the word, beauty. It’s too emotional a word, and emotions, because they stir people up, cause disorder. Emotions would be by his definition ugly.

No wonder he works so hard not to have any and to stamp them down in everyone he has any power stamp them down in.

It’s easy to imagine Dormandy deciding to ban funerals because grief is so ugly.

He’s like a pompous, self-important robot who has decided that it’s time for human beings stop acting so much like human beings.

Life, as he sees it, would be neater, more orderly, not beautiful, but less ugly, if he could just remove all the things that clutter it up and tend to get easily out of place. And that’s what he goes about doing, in his job and in his personal life, eliminating disorder by removing what he sees as clutter. He’s the ultimate minimalist.

He hates fun because when people have fun things, and emotions, get out of place, and he knows the pirates are helping people have fun, so they must be shut down before things really get messy.

This is a mania of his own. It’s not shown that he shares it with anyone else, especially not with the people of England he’s supposedly serving. For all we see of the rest of England---and, probably due to budgetary constraints, that’s precious little. Almost the entire movie takes place either on the boat or in the dim, gray, anonymous interiors Dormandy makes grayer with his presence---the whole country is listening to the pirates’ radio shows and dancing ecstatically to the music.

He has the passive support of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet---an ahistorical indulgence of poetic license. The Prime Minister at the time was Labour’s Harold Wilson and he and his government were busy liberalizing everything in sight and if there’d been a law banning the playing of rock and rock on the radio they’d have been the ones looking to rescind it.--- but the bored and distracted ministers seem to regard what he’s up to in the same way they’d regard his efforts if he was in charge of dredging the Thames or buying new uniforms for the Army. They trust him to have identified a problem and they expect he’ll fix it now that it’s identified, because that’s what he does. It's the sort of dull, routine task of governing they all have to do. Beyond that, they’re not interested.

And outside of the Cabinet he has no allies in his benighted mission. He just has two less than competent minions, a silent and obedient secretary of the if only she’d take off her glasses and let down her hair sort who seems baffled and vaguely annoyed that no one is offering to remove her glasses and let down her hair for her (Sinead Matthews) and who secretly listens to Pirate Radio when she’s alone at her desk, and a single henchman, a self-castrated careerist named, too humorously, Twatt, (Jack Davenport) who is motivated at first by opportunism and then by fear of losing his job. Twatt has no opinion on the music it’s his job to silence and he manages only a pale and impotent anger, more of a sullen irritation, really, towards the crew of Pirate Radio and that has nothing to do with what they stand for, just what they stand in the way of---his career advancement. The music business itself is full of such characters.

Dormandy, when all’s said and done, is a solitary and unique character. He’s a grotesque, a type but not typical and because of that he doesn’t represent anything or anybody but himself. You can’t build a protest movement around a rebellion against a single person’s grotesqueries. Although it’s to be hoped that his daughter and his secretary stand up to him sooner rather than later, he isn’t somebody the DJs need to give much thought to, and they don’t.

They don’t even know he exists. They feel the effects of his efforts to put them out of business---well, of Twatt’s efforts on his behalf---but as annoyances more than as blows struck in a fight for the country’s collective soul, and they thwart Dormandy and Twatt easily, at every turn.

Still, they believe the music they play is important for reasons beyond having a great beat and you can dance to it, and they think of themselves as heroes and rebels and leaders in a cultural guerrilla war. (Actually, they’re a bit self-important in this. Although they love the music, they don’t seem to know that they aren’t the ones making it, that there are real artists at work creating it. I can only recall two times when any of them mentions a musician by name in connection with his or her talent.) And the movie seems to want us to see them this way.

The trouble is it provides no context in which to do so. Not only is England largely absent from Pirate Radio, so are the 60s. There are no juxtapositions with television and movies and news clips from the times. There are no Zelig- or Forrest Gump-esque moments when one of the characters steps into the midst of actual events or meets up with a real person. A scene of one of them having to take his own measure against the likes of Mick Jagger or Ray Davies would have been interesting. Nobody talks about what’s happening in the world beyond the boat. The British Commonwealth was sending troops to Vietnam at the time but there’s only a single reference to the war and it’s offhand, the basis of a metaphor, and used to set-up a joke.

And the music itself doesn’t evoke the period because it’s all too good. It’s all stuff that has lasted. The DJs spin records that I was spinning when I was a DJ in college and that I listened to in grad school along with the Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, and the Clash. A lot of those bands were still recording. The Stones still are. For all the difference it made to me, the two Elvises were contemporaries and as far as any nostalgia the soundtrack brought out in me, it was nostalgia for my own glory days in the 80s. I suspect it would have a similar effect on my eighteen year old niece. (Violet Mannion, by the way, is her high school’s foremost authority on all things Beatles.) This music gets played at everybody’s proms and weddings.

You don’t conjure up the 60s by playing Dusty Springfield singing "You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me" because that song is still breaking hearts.

Had a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. I almost blew it off. Too much to do. Too much else on my mind. What was he going to tell me anyway? “Well, looks like the diabetes hasn’t killed you yet. Keep up the good work.”? But I thought better of it. Would have been the third time I’d rescheduled and doctors can get persnickety about that. It’s almost as if they think they have other things to do with their time than be at my beck and call. And I was feeling sorry for myself. Here I was, worrying about everything and everybody else, hadn’t I earned the right to have someone worry about me for an hour or so? Didn’t I need to be worried over a bit? So off I went, already feeling better because I knew how pathetic I would appear to the doctor and nurses and they would soon be worrying about me right to my face.

Which sort of happened.

The nurse who showed me to the examination room and took my vitals was one I don’t remember ever dealing with before. On the short side, reddish hair in a short ponytail, in her early to mid-twenties, seemingly friendly and chatty enough, and she started in as if I was about to get what I came there to get or at least some interested attention.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” she said, after inviting me to step up on the scale.

“Gorgeous day. We may finally be getting some spring…”

“Too hot in here though.” I noticed she was wearing a sweater over her scrubs. She seemed to remember she was too. “Now. Earlier it was too cold. That’s the way it is in here. First, it’s too hot, then it’s too cold. Two-twenty.”

That was my weight apparently. “Two twenty? That’s down from last time, I think. What was it then?”

“Hop up on the table and I’ll take your blood pressure.”

I don’t hop these days. I climbed, painfully. She didn’t notice my heroic efforts or remark on my stoicism.

“One twenty-six over eighty.”

My blood pressure. I was impressed. With myself. “Now that is way down.”

“Is it?” she said. She was already at the computer, typing the numbers into my chart. I assumed the results from my last visit were right there. If they were, she wasn’t bothering to read them.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “And it was down last time. I think it’s because…”

“Now I have to ask you some questions.”

“Oh, ok.” I was disappointed. I had a bunch of ideas about how I’d lowered my blood pressure and I wanted to share them. Not to brag, of course. Because it might help her to know. She could pass along my secrets to other patients. I’m always the altruist. “Ask away.”

“We have to ask these of everybody. They’re about finding out if you’re suffering from depression. There’s a lot of that going around.”

“Oh boy, don’t I know it. I know several people---“

“Do you find yourself not enjoying the things you used to enjoy?”

Ah! Here was my chance. I was ready to tell her all about how my back problems were causing frustrations and disappointments. “It’s not that I don’t enjoy them, it’s more…”

“Do you feel hopeless?”

“Not hopeless, exactly, but…”

“A lot of people feel that these days.”

“They do?”

“There’s just so much going on in the world. You can’t help thinking it’s never going to bet better.”

“Oh. Well, maybe now the winter’s finally over, things will…”

“Every day, there’s something new that’s awful.”

“I guess. The economy…”

“It’s not the economy.” She was emphatic.

“It’s not.”

“It’s the world.” She sighed. “It’s the way the world is. It just is.”

Check-up went well, by the way. Blood sugar’s down. Blood pressure’s down! Weight’s down. I’m practically back in fighting trim. Ten more pounds and I’ll be ready to climb back in the ring.

When we were finishing up, the doctor typing into the computer the information he needed to renew a couple of my prescriptions, I asked him, “So how are you doing?”

He looked up from the keyboard with a baffled expression.

“How am I doing?” he said.

“Yeah. Things good with you? You’re feeling ok?”

I like this doctor. He’s been treating the Mannions since we moved here, over twelve years ago now. He’s a very thin, affable guy in his late forties who squints behind his black frame glasses as if the lights are just a little too bright for him. He’s generally brisk, direct, and on point, but never brusque or dismissive. He gives the impression that he would be glad to sit and chat if he didn’t have a line of patients waiting and he expects that you have places to go and people to see yourself and would just as soon be out of there as quick as possible. But if you do have to talk or if thinks there’s something more you need to hear he will stay there and listen and chat as long as it takes. So it wasn’t that I was keeping him (and myself) there with my question that had him flummoxed. The question itself had him perplexed and he didn’t seem to know what to make of it or how to answer.

“Doesn’t anyone ever ask you that?” I said.

He thought about this. His expression turned amused. “Not very often,” he said. He thought about it some more. “Not lately than I can remember.”

“People probably don’t want to hear it if you’re not ok. We need to believe doctors never get sick themselves, that you’re all superhuman.”

The problem is when you have to think about how you’re going to get to the door, it’s often hard to remember why you wanted to get to the door in the first place, let alone make any solid, sensible plans about what you’re going to do once you go through it.

That’s the way my days go lately, and I can’t wait for the back surgery so that getting out of the house to go to the library won’t be a major struggle anymore. But it occurred to me that this is how it is for a lot of people these days, and I don’t mean just people living with pain and disabilities. It’s a metaphor for life in a country where the definition of middle class has become “resigned to barely scraping by living from paycheck to paycheck because at least you have a paycheck!”

Some disability advocates object to using disabilities as metaphors. They argue that it emphasizes disability as weakness, other-ness, and even a failure of character. I can see it, but let’s say the metaphor isn’t disability. The metaphor is me and my specific struggle to get out the door to the library yesterday. A lot of people these days have to work so hard just to get to the door that they don’t have the leftover energy to think ahead and make plans about what to do about what’s on the other side of it, which is probably another long walk to another door.

Seems like things can't get better until they've gotten harder and they've just gotten a little harder. An unexpected bill came in and some expected money did not. After paying that and the mortgage, we're pretty well cleaned out with nothing left to get us through until payday next Friday. So, if you like what goes on around here and you can swing it, please consider making a donation. Whatever you can manage would be a big help and much appreciated. Thank you.

Political journalism and sports journalism have a lot in common. Too much in common. Starting with their both being essentially a matter of creating fictions and then reporting on those fictions as if they are facts.

They’re both based on storytelling, which means that the reporting is character-driven, personality-driven. Both retail gossip and rumor. Both revel in sensation, spectacle, voyeurism, scandal, and controversy because those things make stories more dramatic and drama sells. Both encourage and reward idle speculation. What might happen, what could have happened, what didn’t happen are all “reported” and “analyzed” with the same attention, interest, and seriousness as what actually did happen. In neither field are analysts who repeatedly get things wrong in danger of losing their jobs. Just the opposite, in many cases, because on their way to getting things wrong they demonstrate a talent for sensationalism, spectacle-gazing, window-peeping, scandal-mongering, and generating controversy and, like I said, all that sells. It’s better for your career to be consistently wrong in a way that excites readers and viewers and gets and keeps them reading and watching than to be right in a way that has the paying customers leaving the page or changing the channel.

But the most infuriating thing they have in common is an intrinsic problem, which is this:

Both political journalism and sports journalism are endeavors in which people who aren’t as smart, as knowledgeable, as talented, as skilled, or as accomplished as the people they cover see it as their job to tell us why all those smart, knowledgeable, talented, skilled, and accomplished people aren’t doing their jobs right.

Sports journalism treats games as if they’re matters of life and death. Political journalism treats matters of life and death as if they’re all part of a game.

None of this matters very much in the grand scheme of things when it comes to sports journalism. Nobody lives or dies because of who wins the World Series.

Same can’t be said of political journalism where it’s a question of who “wins” the debates over climate change, health care, food stamps, rebuilding the infrastructure, protecting women’s rights and health, deciding which immigrants get to stay in the country, whose family counts as a family, who gets to see a doctor, who gets to eat tonight, or whether to start a war.

There are so many possible endings to this story. I hope it had one of the happy ones.

Guy on his cell at McDonald’s:

“That girl you met before from Florida, she tried to kill herself. That girl you met. Up from Florida for Filet del Sole in Woodstock. She tried to kill herself. She drove up here on a whim. She was manic. On the way back home she had a fight in the car with her lover.”

Oh, sure, times were harder. You had it rough. You had to struggle. Sacrifice. Make do and do without. There was a lot to put up with. A lot of strangeness. Everybody was making it up as they went along. But look at you! You turned out all right, didn’t you? (Although we have to take your word on that.) You dealt with it. You got by. You muddled through. And you’re the better for it. Stronger. Tougher. Self-reliant. Independent.

Not like kids these day, right?

Kids, parents, students, workers, consumers, drivers, voters, everybody who isn’t you, who didn’t go through what you went through, who didn’t have to put up with what you had to put up with, who could use more of the spirit you had, who need to learn the lessons you learned.

But times change. Society changes. The economy expands and contracts. Money flows this way, then that way. Technology advances. There were things going on in the country, in the world, that made the circumstances of your day different from circumstances today.

How things were back in your day isn’t a particularly useful way for gauging how things should be in our day.

Once upon a time, kids walked barefoot to school, and they were the better for it. Except that it was because they were too poor to own shoes.

The Post Office here in Mayberry: As you can see, it’s not much of a hike from the handicapped parking space to the front door, practically just a hop, skip, and a jump for the likes of me. But for others it might as well be a mile, uphill, over rocks.

“That your car?”

A brusque, accusing voice. From off to my left and a little behind. I looked over and around. And down.

Hold on. Few things I need to tell you before I continue telling this story.

I sometimes make myself out to be the Disability Sheriff, policing the handicapped slots in parking lots, checking for window tags and plates, delivering homilistic lectures worthy of Andy Griffith to insensitive temporarily abled folks who don’t consider what it’s like to have to navigate through public spaces blind, deaf, leaning on a cane or on crutches, depending on a walker, or rolling a wheelchair and fail or refuse to make simple accommodations or show a minimum of common courtesy and respect. And I have played that role and I’ll play it again when it needs playing and I’m the only one there to play it. But the truth is the opportunity doesn’t come along all that often. I find that people are mostly considerate and helpful and would be more helpful if I let them. I usually don’t let them. I don’t need a lot of help and consideration myself because my problems aren’t that bad. I can get around well enough. I can’t walk far but I can walk far enough and I can tote and carry, not barges and bales, but bags of groceries and most items that need to be carried out of a store. I rely on the cane for support but my main difficulty is that holding the cane leaves me having to do many things one-handed so I do a lot of juggling when I’m out and about and that gets frustrating and comical in ways I don’t always feel like laughing about. The point is, though, that for the most part I am only mildly inconvenienced by my bad back and gimpy leg. There are plenty of people who have it far, far worse. Which brings me to another important bit of background for this story.

I try not to use handicapped parking slots, especially when there are only one or two in the lot, because I know there are people who have it worse. It’s much harder for them to get into and out of their cars, much more of a challenge to get from their cars to the door of whatever business or store they’re on their way into. I often wish there were more spaces. If you want to hear me play Disability Sheriff complain in front of me about the all times you had to drive around a crowded parking lot for hours looking for an open space and there were all those empty handicapped slots. Know what you encountered? A coincidence. You just happened to come along after the last people who needed one pulled out and before the next who’ll need them pull in. Another time, another day and all those slots would be full and some of the other cars driving around with yours hoping for a space to open up would have handicapped plates. Whenever it happens that I can’t find an open slot and I start to bitch and moan inwardly that I’m going to have to walk a few extra yards, I remind myself of the time another car beat me to the last open handicapped slot at a McDonald’s and an eighty year old woman bent almost double over two canes painfully worked her way out of the driver’s side door and onto her obviously swollen legs.

Okay. On with the story.

“That your car?”

I was at the post office. Outside the post office. Waiting in line to buy Girl Scout cookies. I’d been out running errands and as I’d passed by I’d noticed some Girl Scouts had set up a table just outside the front door. Of course I’d immediately hit the brakes.

It was a busy Saturday morning. The small lot was almost full. There was only one open space and it wasn’t the handicapped space. That was taken by a big red van. Which didn’t bother me because I almost never use the space when I go to the post office (and the space happens to be open) because it’s the only one---see above---and the lot is small and there’s no parking spot that’s far from the door. (By the way, the van had a handicapped license plate. I checked.) As luck would have it, the one open space was right next to the handicapped slot. In fact, because of where the sign’s placed on the wall of the building, it can be mistaken for a handicapped slot. Which is why I hung my window tag after I pulled in. I didn’t want some other self-appointed disabilities sheriff to think I was one of those people. You know, the “I’m only going to be a minute” people. I felt lucky but I wouldn’t have minded if I’d had to find a slot farther away. Like I said, it’s a small lot. More daunting than the prospect of having to walk the extra distance was the sight of the line at the Girl Scout’s cookie stand.

Lines are my biggest challenge and my fear of getting stuck in one is the main reason I have the cane, to lean on and take the pressure off my back and my leg when I have to wait in line somewhere. That’s what I was doing when I heard that brusque, accusing voice behind me.

I looked over and down.

“That your car?” the white-haired guy in the wheelchair said---demanded---again.

“Which one?” I asked. “The van?” For a second I was thinking he hadn’t noticed the van’s plates and was doing his own handicapped parking sheriffing.

“Next to it. The black one.”

“The blue one?” My car’s dark blue but it’s dark enough that it looked black to him. He didn’t feel he had to explain that. He meant my car.

Now I was thinking the red van was his and I was chagrined. The van was on my car’s left and I’d been careful to leave room when I pulled in to because I know how it is. My friend and colleague, the activist, blogger, and anthropologist Bill Peace routinely returns to his car after running some errand to find someone’s parked gunwale to gunwale with him, leaving no room for him to open the car door wide enough to get himself and his wheelchair inside and forcing him to have to wait for the other driver to return from their errands. It’s often a long wait. I was about to apologize and offer to move but I happened to notice his gaze and follow it.

He wasn’t looking at the van.

He was looking at the car on the other side of mine.

An ordinary four-door sedan.

“I have a ramp,” he repeated, but edgier now, almost angry now, like I’d known this when I’d parked and blocked him anyway.

I hadn’t paid any special attention to the sedan when I’d pulled in. Maybe if I had I’d have seen the handicapped plates. I’m not sure what I’d have done about it. Tried to leave more room on that side while still leaving room between my car and the van, I guess. I wouldn’t have left room for a ramp though, because it wouldn’t have occurred to me there might have been a ramp to leave room for.

A ramp? I thought. In that car? That’s interesting. I wonder how that works with a car like that. Would explain the low ride of his wheelchair. He can fit it behind the wheel. Driver’s seat’s probably removed. Bill Peace doesn’t have a ramp. He gets in on the passenger side, boosting himself up and onto the seat, then reaching down to lift his wheelchair which he quickly and deftly disassembles, taking off the wheels and collapsing the chair to stow beside him, locked into a special set of brackets. Bill’s chair isn’t motorized. It’s hand-powered. Manual wheelchairs are more expensive than motorized chairs, by the way. Much more expensive. Good ones have to be custom-built and special ordered. This guy’s chair was also manual. I almost asked him about his ramp, but there was nothing in his expression or voice that invited friendly conversation.

There was also nothing in either that suggested he was asking me to do him a favor and move my car. He was asking. Wasn’t about to. There wasn’t going to be a please, wasn’t going to be a You mind?, and there probably wouldn’t be a thank you after. There was just the expectation that I would rectify my mistake.

Immediately.

Know what else there wasn’t?

Any acknowledgement of my disability.

It wasn’t that he’d overlooked the cane. The cane is how he picked me out as the driver of the car blocking his. He saw the handicapped tag and then looked for a handicapped person to go with it. He knew I wasn’t someone who could snap to it and go skipping right off to take care of a problem he clearly considered I’d caused. He knew it was going to take an extra effort on my part and that it was going to cause me to lose my place in line and that I would then have to spend more time leaning on my cane. And he could assume that I would also probably lose my parking space because I couldn’t just back out and wait for him. I’d be blocking other people’s way into the small and busy parking lot. I’d have to go out the back way and circle around the post office and by the time I returned the space would almost certainly have been taken by someone else. I’d have to re-park farther away. But he gave no indication he knew or cared that by doing him this favor I’d be causing problems for myself. He gave no indication he knew or cared I might have problems or that I would be doing him a favor. He gave no indication he felt any solidarity or sympathy between us. Of course, to someone in a wheelchair someone getting about with just a cane must look as an Olympic hurdler looks to me. And I’m probably a good ten years younger. It’s because there are people in his situation---that is, people who have it harder than I do---that I try avoid parking in handicapped slots. And my tag’s a temporary one. As far as he could know, I might have been using the cane while my sprained ankle healed. So I wasn’t irritated that he was indifferent to my plight. It was his plain, ordinary, inexcusable rudeness that made me mad.

I kept it to myself, though.

Sometimes I can be such a saint.

I gave him a long, level, less than genial look to let him know he had failed miserably in his attempt to make a new friend, then said I’d move my car and hobbled off to do it.

No thank you followed.

And I did lose the space. I had to park across the street. The wait at the cookie stand wasn’t terribly long, however, and I came away with three boxes of Girl Scout cookies. Worth the trouble so I wasn’t too mad in the end.

Would have felt differently if they’d sold out of Tagalongs while I was moving the car.

Now, here’s the thing.

Whatever that guy was expecting of me, I wasn’t expecting anything out of him but ordinary politeness. I was doing him a favor, but it wasn’t much of a favor. You might not even call it a favor. It was simply an act of common courtesy. A thank you would have been nice but he wasn’t obliged to be excessively grateful. Bill Peace and my longtime friend, the poet Steve Kuusisto (who, some of you may not know, is blind) have written and spoken repeatedly about how the temporarily-abled often seem to expect a disabled person to gush and fawn and flatter in gratitude for what amounts to a simple act of common courtesy or, and not incidentally, obeying the law. There’s also the expectation that pity and condescension are like gifts for which the giver should be rewarded with extra does of gushing, fawning, and flattery. “Oh, how kind you are to feel so sorry for me. God bless you!” On top of this, is a general expectation that the disabled should be cheerful, uncomplaining, humble, and brave as if it’s our purpose and responsibility in life to set an example of perseverance and hope in the face of adversity or as if we should know how much trouble we’re causing the abled and go about in a permanent state of smiling apology.

This is from people who want to be kind and are tying to be helpful.

There are plenty of others who make it clear they think the disabled should just stay home or at least out of their way.

It’s surprising how many of these others make it clear while they are working at jobs that require them to make accommodations for the disabled as a matter of course and of law. Bill can tell you stories about flight attendants who seem to think it’s their duty to keep passengers in wheelchairs off their airplanes and Steve can tell you stories about restaurant hosts and hostesses who’ve all but said shoo when he’s showed up at their front doors with his guide dog. And since both Steve and Bill are activists, advocates, and educators---in very real ways one of their jobs is Disability Sheriff---they’ve interceded on behalf of many other disabled people and can tell you their stories about when they were abused, insulted, belittled, dismissed, shamed, humiliated, discriminated against, and denied their rights by all sorts and conditions among the temporarily-abled making it clear they think a disabled person is practically committing a crime by trying to live a normal life.

Here’s another thing.

I know that guy I encountered at the post office. That is, I know who he is. He’s a prominent citizen here in Mayberry and I’ve met him at a number of public events. And this is a small small town. We bump into each other often. He almost certainly recognized me. The other thing I didn’t get from him besides a please and a thank you was a Hello, how have you been? And it wouldn’t just have been neighborly of him. It would have been typical.

I would never have thought of him as a rude or unfriendly guy and I still don’t. I’m thinking of him as someone who was probably having a bad day.

I have no reason to think his bad day had to do with his disability. Another thing Bill and Steve will be glad to talk to you about is how disabilities don’t define people except in the eyes of others who think of disabilities as defining and limiting. But the fact was that however his day was going, at that moment it was worse on account of his disability. Not because of his disability. Because there was only one handicapped parking space. And this is routine problem for him and therefore a constant frustration. I didn’t mean to block him in. I wouldn’t have if I’d known it was his car. He didn’t know either of that but that was beside the point. The point is that the guy spends a lot of time being blocked in and in more ways than just not being able to get to his car right when he needs to.

And that’s the way it is almost all the time for everyone who is in any degree disabled. One way or another, at one too many times or another, we find ourselves blocked in when all we’re trying to do is live a normal life. And it doesn’t matter how many people there are who are kind and considerate and intent on doing the right thing, which is, the commonly courteous thing, there are still plenty of others who think that our being blocked in and blocked out is the way it should be and who are determined to keep it that way. At least one of them is running for President, and I can’t say this enough, Fuck you, Rand Paul.

That gets infuriating, when it’s not depressing, demoralizing, and flat-out overwhelming. And it doesn’t matter how cheerful, uncomplaining, humble, brave, resilient, resourceful, persevering, or hopeful we try to be, we’re like everybody else.

If you like what goes on around here and you can swing it, please consider making a donation. Whatever you can manage would be a big help and much appreciated. Thank you.

And thanks to all for reading the blog.

_____________________________________________

I didn’t watch, only followed it on Twitter, and Twitter is no way to get the news, but did Bruce Jenner come out as a transwoman and a typical rich Republican ladder-puller in the same interview?

People in my Twitter feed expressed surprise---and some disgust---at Jenner’s declaration that he votes, essentially, to deny full citizenship, even full personhood, to people like himself and to take rights away from them. Although more Republicans and conservatives are coming around, for the entirety of Jenner’s adult life, which means all the while he was hiding afraid and ashamed in the closet, Republicans have been actively hostile to the LGBT community. I can imagine that Jenner might have told people he was a Republican as a part of his disguise. He wouldn’t be the first person with a secret who pretended contempt for people making no secret of their being what he doesn’t want anyone else to know he is. But it’s harder to accept that he truly believed in making life miserable for people like himself.

On the other hand, having to struggle with troubles doesn’t necessarily make someone sympathetic to others struggling with the same troubles any more than being lucky and free from certain worries and cares makes you unsympathetic to people who aren’t so lucky. Sure, there are plenty of rich, entitled, spoiled Republicans born to comfort and privilege who make a show and a virtue of lecturing the poor and unfortunate on how to fend for themselves the way those rich and entitled politicians never had to fend for themselves---Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Mitt Romney, et al---but then there was FDR and the Kennedys.

The question is, how much of his heart was in the way he claims to have voted? How true a Republican was (and is) Jenner really?

Apparently Jenner was much more articulate in explaining his gender identity and his feelings about being a transperson than he was trying to explain away his politics. His idea of what it means to be a Republican and a conservative includes, he said, believing in the Constitution and he believes in it! As if believing in the Constitution was like believing the bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ.

Not only did Jenner come out as a Republican, he came out as a stupid Republican. But I repeat myself.

What does that mean? You believe in the Constitution? Isn’t that like saying, as Terry Pratchett says of the wizards of Discworld’s “belief” in the gods, that you believe in tables? It’s an utterly meaningless statement and Republicans who say it don’t mean anything by it except “I’m a Republican.” It’s a signifier. It identifies you as a member of the club, like wearing a flag pin or a cross or team jersey. To the degree it has an actual meaning that meaning is this:

“The Constitution is ours because the country is ours. Whatever’s in it---both the Constitution and the country---belongs exclusively to us.”

Ideally, Jenner’s coming out will give hope and courage to other transpeople and open the minds and hearts of non-transpeople, including some Republicans. Also ideally, now that he no longer has to pretend to be a “normal” man or a man at all, Jenner will also come out as a champion and advocate for not just transpeople but people who don’t meet conservative definitions of “normal” in general. He will openly deplore and reject the Republicans’ Othering of so many of their fellow Americans and the conservatives’ politics of “us” against “THEM!”

Maybe he did that last night. Like I said. All I know is what I read on the Twitter, and Twitter’s no way to get the news.

But here’s the concern.

Besides being surprised and disappointed and even angry at learning Jenner’s a Republican, some people in the feed smugly expressed their expectation that now that other Republicans know they’ll turn on Jenner and cast him from the fold.

These people are forgetting how much being rich matters to Republicans, and that might include Jenner himself.

All these years Jenner might have been voting to protect his money over the needs his own heart and soul.

But, of course, having money is a way to take care of those needs yourself. If money doesn’t buy happiness, it can buy you the freedom not to have to worry about certain things you’re all too willing and happy to let other people have to worry about for themselves.

And that’s the mark of a true Republican these days, isn’t it? The certain belief that you are entitled to all the privileges, status, wealth, and freedom you can buy and other people can just go suff.

To be as romantic a writer as Thomas McGuane you have to know what isn’t romantic as well as what is. One thing you never want to be is somebody’s homeopathic remedy:

It was unclear whether Andy had a job, though he did have an office with a daybed for what he called “nooners.” Jessica didn’t learn this appalling term until she’d already experienced it, stumbling absently onto the daybed with him. Her previous affairs had been grueling, and she had promised herself not to do grueling again. She saw Andy, initially, as a kind of homeopathic remedy. But then something got under her skin. Maybe it was the karaoke machine in his bachelor apartment or his unpleasant cat or the Ping-Pong matches he pressured her into; the way he darted around in a crouch at his end of the table made it clear to her that she’d never sleep with him again.

Last class meeting of the semester this afternoon and I did something that added to whatever little bit of good I've done in my time in front of a classroom beyond saving that marriage back in Indiana all those years ago.

I showed a movie.

"Of course you did, professor," I hear those of you who've been paying attention and taking notes chiming in. "Wasn't the course built around watching and writing about movies?"

Very good, class. Give yourself an A for the day. But the good was in the particular movie I showed.

Plan for today was pizza and Bringing Up Baby. That's what it says on the syllabus. Well, the pizza's not on the syllabus. But it's become a Professor Mannion tradition. Bringing Up Baby is on the syllabus and they'd been somewhat prepared for it by things Matt Zoller Seitz talked about during his visit to the class two weeks ago and other discussions we've had over the course of the semester. But, as I warned them, syllabi are subject to change, and about midway through the term I learned something that caused me to plan this change.

There was a movie none of them had seen.

There are a lot of movies none of them have seen. None of them had seen The Searchers. None of them have seen Bringing Up Baby. This is a matter of experience and opportunity, not another kids today harumph. That's a millennia old calumny anyway. Geezers going back to the Pharaohs forgetting what they were like when they were young themselves. The kids in my class are kids. They've been busy exploring what matters to their generation and have had little time to explore what mattered to their parents' and grandparents' generations, never mind what has mattered and what's likely to continue to matter to all generations. They're just beginning to get around to it. That's what college is for. These kids are a curious bunch. They want to know. That's how I found out that they hadn't seen today's feature presentation. One of them came across Roger Ebert's Great Movies essay online and wrote about it on our class' Facebook page, saying that it was a movie she'd always wanted to see and Ebert's essay made her want to see it even more. A few of her classmates chimed in expressing the same sentiments, which made me wonder about the rest. So I asked them at the start of the next class meeting.

Not a one had seen it.

I made up my mind on the spot.

All movies are meant to be seen on a big screen in a dark theater in the company of friends and many cheerful strangers. Trouble is that's not how these kids see most movies. They watch them on TV or on their computers, usually alone. They have subscriptions to Netflix and Hulu and Amazon Prime. This limits their viewing of classics. There's apparently no film society on campus that screens older or non-mainstream or foreign movies. There's not a good art house close to campus. This means there are a lot of great films they will never see. But it also means there are great movies they will see by accident while channel surfing or browsing the web. This can be a fun way to discover a movie or an actor or a director you'd never heard of or knew little about. It wouldn't be a bad way for them to see Bringing Up Baby for the first time. But this movie? Uh unh.

This one they had to see if not on a large screen than at least on one bigger than their laptop's. And they had to see it in the company of other movie lovers so they could walk out of the dark quoting lines back and forth, discussing favorite scenes and characters, and making plans to see it again soon this time with friends who had never seen it.

You're way ahead of me here, aren't you? You know what movie I showed them.

Some people who think they know how my devious mind works might tell you that the real reason I showed Casablanca, or, at any rate, a main reason was so I could do my Peter Lorre impression. I happen to do a pretty good Peter Lorre, as a matter of fact. To do it I have to do my Bogie impression and that's pretty bad, but it's only a couple of lines so it doesn't ruin it.

"You despise me, don't you?"

"If I gave you any thought I probably would."

"I have many friends in Casablanca, but somehow, because you despise me, you're the only one I trust."

How was that? Pretty good, right?

And I did do it for the class. After the movie was over and I'd let them sit there in the dark for a bit, reveling it what they'd just seen.

I think they were impressed.

But there were a couple of things more important I also wanted to say to them.

One was that now they needed to see The Maltese Falcon.

The other was this.

They have a personal connection to Casablanca.

Six degrees of separation.

Casablanca was written by the twin brother screenwriting team of Philip and Julius Epstein. Philip's son Leslie became a novelist and a professor at Boston University. He's still there, directing the creative writing program. He's been there a long time. Long enough that I was one of his students. I took two writing classes with him. Got an A in both. Leslie's recommendation got me into the Iowa Writers Workshop.

"What this means for you," I told my students, "Is that because of the way knowledge gets handed down, you've been getting writing tips from the writers of Casablanca."

After letting that sink in for a minute, I finally got to my real point. I told them this story that Leslie had told our class. You might have heard it before. It's part of Casablanca lore but I first heard it from Leslie.

Casablanca started shooting without a finished script. The Epstein brothers were writing at a furious pace trying to keep ahead of the filming. Sometimes they were turning in pages the night before the scenes were to be shot. Eventually things caught up to them. Because it was all shot on the lot the director Michael Curtiz was shooting in sequence and he reached the point when he was ready to shoot the final scene before the Epsteins had written it.

They didn't even know what would be in it.

They hadn't decided on the ending.

They didn't know how to write Rick out of the fix they'd written him into. They were even considering not writing him out of it. They thought thety were going to have to let Strasser shoot Rick at the same time Rick shot him.

Not something they wanted to do.

They wanted to write a happy ending but they were stuck.

After batting around a lot of what they decided were bad ideas, they decided to take a break. They went out to dinner, promising each other they weren't going to talk about the script. They were going to put it out of their minds at least for a couple of hours. And that's what they did.

But then, after dinner, as they slid into the back seat of the cab taking them back to their office at Warner Brothers, they suddenly turned to each other and said at the same instant, "Round up the usual suspects.

There it is, the good I did as a teacher today. Twenty-five to thirty years from now there are going to be thirteen middle-aged adults who from time to time will crack themselves up to the bafflement and chagrin of their college age children blurting for no apparent reason "Round up the usual suspects" and "We'll always have Paris" and "I am shocked! Shocked to find there's gambling going on in here!" and "Here's looking at you, kid"

So, we're done. They have a final paper to write and I'm holding individual editorial conferences with each of them next week. But the conferences will be virtual. By phone or via Skype. I'm on the road home and won't be going back to Syracuse until the fall. I'm feeling wistful about that. I'll miss teaching. I'll miss these kids. They were a good group. I had a lot of fun. I told them that. Without going into detail, I told them how I’d been having a rough time of things physically and it was wearing me down. Some weeks I was ready to throw in the towel but then this class kept me going. I thanked them for that. I didn't say what I should have said, though, by way of a goodbye, so I'll say it here in hopes they'll stumble across it sometime.

Here's looking at you, kids.

______________________________

Leslie Epstein does a pretty good Peter Lorre impression too. But he does it on paper and over the course of 384 pages in his novel Pandaemonium.

No better antidote to the pre-dawn blues than reading about the birds you’re up before.

This is one of those pieces of advice the giver would do well to remember to take more often himself, but here's what I recommend. Have a couple of field guides and bird books in the house, keep them within easy reach; when you find yourself wide awake in the predawn dark and the goblins and trolls start to work, grab those books and start reading about birds. It won't be exactly like the arrival of the eagles but it's much more of a solace to soul and mind than hopping on the internet and reading about the latest outrage or calamity or political idiocy you can't do anything about. Imagining birds will take you out of yourself, turn your thoughts towards what's good and beautiful in life, and keep you marginally hopeful and sane until the first real birds start to sing.

Around here the birds first up and singing are usually the robins. They're soon joined by cardinals followed by sparrows and chickadees. All interesting birds and worth reading more about despite their familiarity. But I'm not reading about them or species less common to the neighborhood and about which I'd normally be taking the opportunity to learn more about. Vireos, for example. I'm not up on vireos. And there are all those warblers to identify and keep sorted out. But I'm not reading about them. I'm reading about birds that are as familiar as the robins, cardinals, sparrows, and chickadees. Maybe more familiar because they're usually far more conspicuous.

Blue jays.

For some reason, this morning, I've been reading about blue jays.

Most familiar of all is the petulant shriek of jay jay jay. Henry Thoreau remarked on the “unrelenting steel-cold scream of a jay, unmelted, that never flows into a song, a sort of wintry trumpet, screaming cold; hard, tense frozen music, like the winter sky itself.”

It's not as if I've never looked up blue jays before. But it seems that no matter how many times I've read about a species in the past, I'm always surprised by a fact striking me as new. And just now I was struck by this fact about blue jays.

Blue jays aren't blue.

They're brown.

At any rate, the pigment in their feathers is brown. That they appear blue is a simple trick of the light.

As are most things.

I probably knew that and forgot it or at least read it before and it didn’t stick. There are so many interesting facts about birds it’s impossible to keep every new fact in my head. New facts crowd others out of the mental nest. The ground around the tree where all my bird lore roosts is littered with broken egg shells of unfledged information.

Here's another “new” fact about blue jays.

They're mimics.

They like to imitate the calls of other birds.

Like hawks.

This was mildly disappointing to learn and I'll tell you why.

Up until this morning I thought we had hawks in the neighborhood.

We probably still do. They just don't visit as frequently as I thought based on how often I hear them or hear what up until now I assumed were hawks.

Routinely I'll hear a red tailed hawk scream and I'll go to the window or step off the porch into the yard and scan the sky, half-dreading and, I should be ashamed to admit, half-hoping to see one swoop down to pluck up one of the chipmunks who call our property home and I'll be surprised and disappointed to see that the sky is empty of raptors.

That's odd, I'll often think. It sounded so close, almost like it was right near by and practically at ground level, no higher up than the tops of the trees.

Darn blue jays.

None of my books say why they imitate hawks probably because the answer's obvious. It's a good way to scare off other birds, including actual hawks. Going by what is most easily observable about blue jays in any neighborhood---they like to hog the bird feeders-- I'd wager they mainly do it to have the cafeteria all to themselves.

Next time I hear a "hawk" that close and low I'll know to not bother looking up into the sky. I'll look into the branches of the nearest trees or across at the neighbor's feeders for a blue jay being a wise guy.

____________________________________

Five fifteen. The robins are having their say. Time for me to get on the road for Syracuse. If you're awake and in need of some comforting reading and you don't have your own guide books handy, visit Cornell's wonderful and handy website, All About Birds.

Honest to God knitting circle meets at our Barnes & Noble. Tonight, around 7:30, six women at varying stages of middle age, gathered around one of the larger tables with their needles, skeins, and work baskets, knitting one and purling two, while their chais and lattes grew cold. This is not your grandmother’s knitting circle. There were laptops open on the table, knitting websites showing in the browser windows, and an iPad was being handed around so that everyone could study a new and intriguing pattern. Do you follow patterns when knitting like you do when sewing? I dated a girl back in college who took up knitting. She made me a scarf. It was as long as the fourth Doctor’s and the color of an army pup tent in the rain. She’d intended it to be a sweater but she got mad at me soon after she’d started. She would have given up, she told me, but she wanted to use up the yarn so it wouldn’t be around to remind her of me. Oh, and happy birthday! My pal Gary told me I was lucky she’d quit on the sweater. If someone knits you a sweater, he said, you’re obliged to marry them. But back to the knitting circle at Barnes & Noble.

Two of the women weren’t talking knitting. They were talking home repair. One of them had just had a repairman in.

“You know what he did before he left?” she said.

“Swept?”

“Swept and vacuumed!”

“That’s how it should be.”

“That’s what he said. He said it was part of doing a job. I’m telling you, the place was cleaner than when he started.”

Handwriting on a wall? In a still, small voice? Will the skies open up? Will a burning bush be involved? He could speak to Kasich in a dream. Ample precedent for that. Angelic messengers are another favorite mode of divine communication.

Jesus H. Christ on a cracker! There’s a politician living in America in the 21st Century who believes or thinks he has to pretend to believe that God likes to play fantasy football with American democracy. Kasich was born after World War II so he grew up with the problem of a God who let the Nazis murder ten million people and yet he still thinks God cares who runs for President of the United States?

Over the centuries God has watched as multitudes of his children have been wiped from existence by wars, famines, plagues, genocides, earthquakes, floods, erupting volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, plane crashes, car crashes, train wrecks and shipwrecks, and other calamities and catastrophes, natural and man-made. If he actively involves himself in our lives to the point of picking and choosing which vain and ambitious mediocrity runs for political office, then the logical conclusion is that he lets all this happen and it means that either we don’t matter to him or he hates us.

Kasich is hardly alone among politicians who assume God has nothing better to do but advance their careers. George W. Bush assumed it. I wonder if when he and God speak---if they’re still on speaking terms---Bush asks God why he called on him to lose a war, let a city drown, and dither helplessly as the economy fell apart.

Considering God’s voting record, it should be a given that if God chooses a politician to lead us, he’s doing it to punish us.

Or fuck us over just for fun.

Either way, politicians who announce God told them to run are warning us not to vote for them if we know what’s good for us.

Right now there are thousands---Thousands? Millions!---of parents praying to God not to let their children die of illnesses and injuries and John Kasich is interrupting to ask him to focus his attention on him and his ambitions which, by the way, if realized, would result in President Kasich signing into law the repeal of Obamacare, taking away insurance from the families of many of these sick and broken children and in effect condemning them to death.

Kasich thinks God might want him to be President so more children will die?

The Cafe Wha? House Band bills itself as “The Best Damn Band in New York City.” I wouldn't know. I’m just a tourist. From what I heard last night, for a band to be better, they’d have to be the second coming of the Asbury Jukes. They'd have to be the Asbury Jukes. The music ranged across eras and styles, mixing rock, funk, blues, soul, salsa, and pop standards with recent hits, band members taking turns fronting mostly covers but covers that to me often sounded better than the originals. It'd be blasphemy to suggest band leader Bryan Stephens' rendition of “Solsbury Hill” was at least as good as Peter Gabriel's original so let's pretend I'm not suggesting it. But after hearing his “Take Me to Church” I'm thinking who needs Hozier and his and Kim Summerson's duet on “Need You Now” killed me deader than any other version has killed me and I'm routinely killed by Adele's own duet with Darius Rucker.

Like all good bar bands, they want the crowd up and dancing. A good third a third of the crowd was happy to oblige. More might have joined in but there wasn't room. There's no dance floor. You want to dance you do it in the one aisle between the booths against the wall and the tables in front of the stage. That means you do it in a long double file line with other customers coming and going and the waiters and waitresses trying to get by with trays of drinks and food. Last night's crowd was mostly twenty and thirty-somethings with more than a few people in their forties and just enough geezers scattered here and there---including a boothful celebrating the birthday of the most geezerish member of their party---that the forty-somethings could relievedly observe to each other they weren't the oldest people in the joint. But it looked like only twenty-somethings got up to dance and all of them were women. They included a contingent of six tall blondes and one short brunette we'd had to wait to be seated before we could make our way to our own booth, a fact I mention to emphasize the narrowness of the aisle as much as for the lovely imagery. The blondes and the brunette danced right in front of us, singing along with songs that were hits when their parents were in grade school. Two of the blondes were wearing 70s vintage outfits they must have scavenged from the closets of their mother's old bedrooms at their grandparents' houses. One wore a flowered peasant mini dress over mustard orange tights, the other a white peasant blouse and a filmy pair of paisley bells.

Like I said, the waiters and waitresses had to work their way through the dancers, dodging and weaving, moving as quickly as they could while being careful with their trays. Most of them went about with a mixture of amusement, resignation, and detachment, treating getting around the dancers without spilling drinks or colliding with the paying customers or each other as just part of doing their jobs. A few seemed to think it was a fun and interesting challenge and a couple moved in time to the music with their heads bobbing as if they saw themselves as part of the dance. But one appeared to be taking it personally.

The dancers were to her what traffic is to a cabbie trying to get a pregnant passenger to the hospital before she gives birth in the back seat.

While the rest of the staff went about either expressionless, as if trying to pretend the dancers weren’t there, or with weak, apologetic smiles, silently signaling how sorry they were to have to do their jobs and get in the way of the dancers’ fun, she wore a no-nonsense frown that had such seriousness of purpose and concentrated force behind that if any of the dancers had taken their eyes off the band and met her gaze it would have thrown them out of the aisles in all directions to land in heaps on the tabletops and in seated customers’ laps. She was short and shapely, not heavy but solid, very pretty despite her frown, even because of it, with lots of soft, springy black curls that had probably been neatly in place when she started her shift but were now coming loose from their clips at all points. The wait staff wears the requisite New York City black, the men in t-shirts but the women in camisole tops so there’s plenty of smooth skin and hints of cleavage on display, but on this waitress the effect was more athletic than sexy, due, I think, to the way she carried herself as she charged back and forth through the crowd. The other waiters and waitresses clearly saw it as their duty to avoid bumping into the dancers. She clearly thought it was the dancers’ job to get out of her way if they knew what was good for them and on several of her fastbreak trips by us she looked like she was ready to start throwing elbows. That was when I could actually see her as she went past. Because of how short she was she was often lost from view in the crowd and the only way I knew where she was was to follow her tray when it floated by over the heads of the dancers as she carried it straight-armed and perfectly level high above her.

One other thing to note about her.

The staff and the band at Cafe Wha? are a fairly diverse bunch, the crowd somewhat less so, but besides being all women and all very young, the dancers were all white. She was black. Which doesn’t signify in Greenwich Village the way it might in other parts of Manhattan and the boroughs. What it did was call attention to the class differences generally inherent in all interactions between people with money to spend and the people paid to serve them while they’re spending it. That is between people who are there to play and people who are there because they have to work for their living. And within this dynamic as it played out on Cafe Wha?’s dance floor, this waitress did not see it as her role to be servile. It was her job to do her job and do it right and the dancers were getting in the way of her doing it. And as far as she was concerned, since they were old enough to know better, they were doing it either because they were careless and thoughtless or because they were frivolous and oblivious. Either way, they were butterflies and she was a honeybee who wasn’t about to put up with their flightiness if it meant she couldn’t get to the flowers to do her job.

I could almost hear her saying what I’m sure she wanted to say as she bore down on yet another oblivious butterfly, “Out of my way, girl. I’ve got tips to earn.”